Living In The Newest Level In Hell

Dante Didn't Envision PLC Programming Or He Would Have Warned Me...


Dang it Ladies and Gentlemen, but this morning finds me frustrated to the point of wanting to pull the remaining hair out of my ever greying, ever balding head.

I swear that if there is a mistake which can be made or a hardware/software error which can be tripped over, I believe that I have managed to do so with my size 13 feet in the past fourteen months since I endeavored to start a company and build custom PLC based control panels.

Hey...It's not like I didn't TRY to avoid disaster.

After all, the first thing I did was go to the factory up in Indianapolis before I cut a single hole in a NEMA 12 cabinet, and I took their introductory controller class before I stripped the first wire and stuck it into a DIN rail mounted terminal strip, but to no good end yet because today no matter what...

I keep finding a way to delay my progress.

And I'm so hard headed and proud and afraid that it's something silly I'm doing wrong that I always wait before asking for help until I'm not only LATE on delivery...

but now I'm REAL LATE on the modification of a panel I built early last year.

So any way, past laments aside, about 1 AM this morning I was cruising along happy as a clam.

Everything was working like it was supposed to in the shop.  The whistles were whistling and the bells were ringing and all of the high priced thing-a-ma-jigs were singing the same song in the correct key...Z minor.

I had it under control I thought, then when I added the last rung on the new PLC ladder program and made a couple of modifications to the touch screen apperances...

...I was ready to print everything out and modify the owners manual...

...I was just hours away from taping up a big box with everything in it Saturday afternoon and running to FedEX...

...and then WHAM...

...when I downloaded the last few revisions to the PLC controller everything went to HELL.



I mean, now stuff which I didn't even change on the last revision stopped working.

Now I can't even get the PLC to move past the first intro screen which only has our company name and a button that says "CONTINUE" on it.

I've since spent another  FOUR HOURS fiddling around, doing incantations and Voodoo chants and threatening the machine with my biggest hammer and still...

NOTHING.

I've re-booted every computer in the house in the process, reprogrammed the  Heat Pump Thermostat, went out and rotated the tires on both cars, and still I can't get this stupid box to work.

It won't work even with software which I wrote a year ago and I know worked at the time and hasn't been changed.

Therefore I must have a bad PLC unit, else there is some other stupid thing I don't know about and managed to trip over and now I have to wait until Monday to ask the technical support people a question.

I'm so damn smart I've out smarted myself...

A G A I N...